Flipkart said to raise $1 billion with plans for $1 billion more

The 10-year-old startup is fighting for its life against Amazon.com Inc. and other rivals looking for a piece of the fast-growing India market.Bloomberg | March 20, 2017, 18:14 IST

By Saritha Rai

Flipkart Online Services Pvt has completed a $1 billion fundraising and aims to raise as much as $1 billion more over the next few months, according to people familiar with the matter, giving India’s largest e-commerce company capital to battle back against rising competition.

Flipkart closed the latest round on Friday at a valuation of about $10 billion, said the people, asking not to be named because the matter is private. The valuation is a decline from Flipkart’s $15.5 billion in 2015. The company didn’t immediately provide comment.

The 10-year-old startup is fighting for its life against Amazon.com Inc. and other rivals looking for a piece of the fast-growing India market. Earlier this year, New York’s Tiger Global Management installed its own Kalyan Krishnamurthy as chief executive officer to replace one of the company’s founders.

The latest fundraising shows investors believe Flipkart has a good chance. The company’s backers in the latest round include Microsoft Corp., EBay Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.

Flipkart is struggling through India’s version of a dot-com bust. Hundreds of Indian internet startups are losing money, cutting jobs and reducing valuations in exchange for fresh financing. A Bangalore-based firm even put together the Deadpool list, a catalog of dead or dying startups similar to the F**ked Company website created in the aftermath of the U.S. internet bubble.